ApplicationsStart with the Internet itself for freely available software technologieSj then add some custom software. T FOR PROGRAMMERS, DESIGNING AND IMPLEmenting distributed multimedia applications used to be a formidable challenge. As recently as five years ago, tools were scarce for developing and integrating multimedia content, as was system support for realtime media streaming and its control. Application pioneers had little choice but to custom-build most of the technology needed for their distributed multimedia applications. Custom building typically involved such sophisticated elements as authoring tools 16], reliable audio-video transport mechanisms [9], connection management schemes [8], and agents to coordinate the behavior of cooperating application components dispersed throughout a network [5].Aside from the heavy labor requirement implied by this approach, another practical consequence was the difficulty of achieving application portability.The recent Internet revolution has greatly affected construction of networked multimedia applications. New approaches to distributing application logic (such as Java applets) and coordinating distributed processing (such as CORBA) have claimed the attention of application developers 14]. And Web browsers, such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer, now offer a universally available container in which to assemble and integrate rich interactive software components. Moreover, the range of today's multimedia toolkits and component

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